HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use the solution to protect our general workloads, migrating VMs to the cloud and protecting VMs in the cloud. Our primary use case is to protect and provide DR.

Zerto has enabled us to mature our DR stance quite a bit in how we protect functions.

The near-synchronous replication works pretty well. Going from RPOs of an hour to five seconds is pretty interesting.

Zerto enables us to do disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center.

Having disaster recovery in the cloud is very important for our organization as we're currently moving our production workloads to the cloud.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. Our RPOs are getting lower.

The speed of recovery in Zerto is much faster than with SRM.

The on-prem to Azure, migration, and protection aspects are good. Zerto is one of the few tools that work pretty good and at moving between regions or clouds.

The near-synchronous replication is good. 

Automated protection of workloads from one site to another could be improved. For example, with SRM, you can create a VM, and it automatically protects it based on mappings and other factors. Zerto does not do this.

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

It can throw us for a loop at times and it can be challenging to figure out.

We are pretty large-scale. It's been one of the challenges, as it seems pretty simple for smaller scales, but as you get larger, it gets more challenging, which is where the automation piece and lack of that comes in.

Level one and level two are excellent. The development team is a challenge sometimes because they work four days a week. Sometimes, when we have to have a Dev escalation or a severe issue, it takes quite a long time to get a response.

We use SRM and Commvault. Zerto is better than both of them. Commvault is not great at Orchestration DR, and SRM locks you into VMware.

We were early adopters, so the deployment has been challenging, but it's definitely getting more mature and better as we go. 

We bought it from a reseller but we used Zerto services to get it going.

It has reasonable pricing comparable to VMware and others.

Overall, I rate Zerto an eight out of ten because it makes testing easy and provides flexibility between on-premises and various clouds.

We use it primarily for DR situations. Whenever we lose our primary location, we switch to another location. We also backup resources and migrating VMs in and out of different environments, cloud versus on-prem.

The most valuable feature is that it provides real-time backup. We're in the financial industry and have to have 100 percent uptime. 

It helps us have a lot better uptime than what we would normally have. It's always real-time synced, with instant recovery. We can return to another location if power drops or generators don't work.

It gives us quick uptime. It also helps our customers maintain that trust, so Zerto really does help with trust. We generally use it on-premise.

The near-synchronous replication is really good. It gives us quick uptime. It helps our customers keep that trust in us.

We use Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. Until Zerto, I didn't pay much attention to RPOs. Zerto gives the ability to bring RPOs down to seconds. 

For certain use cases, Zerto has a better speed of recovery compared to other solutions but it doesn't tie into our SANs like Veeam does. 

It is a little expensive.

We could streamline the installation better. The other thing would be ransomware notifications, like IO anomaly notifications.  If they integrate with the SAN, that would be valuable to see in terms of snapshots.

I have been using Zerto for six to seven years.

We came up with the new version, and it's pretty good. If there's no reason for me to say it's unstable. It's been proven so far.

If you buy the licensing, it will scale up to size until you will spend money on it. 

Support is helpful.

Positive

If you want to pull from the snapshot instead of tools, then SRMs are better used for this case. It's fast and the first to market with continuous data protection.

Zerto is easier to use. There is some standup at the beginning, you must install the agents. It's easy to use when it's working right, but sometimes, it takes great effort to get it going if something goes down. 

We use another solution, Veeam. We keep them both because they're both beneficial for different use cases.

The initial setup is straightforward, but if you have it the first time, you are stranded in the industry. It could take a little figuring out, but Zerto is pretty helpful.  

There have been a couple of situations which they weren't able to fix an issue right away. We move everything off to a different server until we can circle around and extend that one.

We did it in-house.

Zerto has paid for itself in man-hours saved. 

Zerto gives you the ability to bring RPOs in seconds. We can have instant uptime for everything. 

It's more expensive than other solutions but it's worth it for our environment. It has made it very easy to restore files because you can restore them down to the second. It's pretty simple. We have the agent and all the hosts. 

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

For one client, the use case was to facilitate data center migration, and for another client, it was for failover and failback of the data center for DR. We wanted to have controlled failover and failback of related applications for DR.

We have not used it for disaster recovery in the cloud. Everything has been on-prem so far.

Zerto helps in automating disaster recovery capabilities. It allows automation and orchestration of complex activities.

We have used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. Zerto’s overall effect on our RPOs has been pretty good.

It has also been effective for our RTOs.

Zerto has helped to reduce downtime, specifically for failover and failback, but it is hard to qualify the time saved.

Zerto has not saved us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes because we have not been impacted by any such issue.

Zerto has helped to reduce the organization's DR testing. There is about 20% reduction.

It has also reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation, but I have not seen any reduction in the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

Its ease of use and scalability are valuable. 

I also find the near-synchronous replication to be valuable. It is extremely important for organizations.

There should be more comprehensive cyber recovery capabilities.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It is deployed across multiple locations. There are roughly about 4,000 VMs.

We might use it to migrate to cloud solutions. It is to be decided.

I have not reached out to them myself.

We were using SRM. We switched to Zerto for automation.

Zerto is highly effective in terms of ease of use as compared to other solutions. Zerto is also pretty effective in terms of its speed of recovery.

We can easily migrate data using the Zerto console.

Zerto has not yet replaced all of our legacy backup solutions but it will.

Our setup is all on-premises. I was involved in its deployment to some degree. It was pretty straightforward to deploy.

It took about three months. It was an enterprise-wide solution.

It was a combination of in-house staff and a third party. The third party was a VAR or value-added reseller.

It required just a handful of staff for deployment. It does not require any maintenance from our side.

We have seen an ROI, but I do not have the metrics.

It is not a bad pricing model.

We evaluated other options on paper, not physically.

Zerto is an effective tool for automation and orchestration of complex activities.

The biggest lesson that I have learned by using Zerto is the need for application involvement and defining protection groups.

Overall, I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

I am a system engineer and IT architect. We use Zerto to protect our production -environment and critical applications. Everything is on-prem. We don't do any DR to the cloud. We're protecting around 300 VMs right now.

I've been fortunate enough not to need to rely on Zerto in an actual disaster, but we do testing every year. Sometimes, it's multiple times annually or at the year's end. It takes the recovery workflow, which would normally take a lot of planning, and reduces that to just a few minutes. 

The most valuable feature is the low RTO that covers our VMs and a secondary data center.

I would like Zerto to add support for VMware's lifecycle manager. 

I have used Zerto for about eight years.

I rate Zerto eight out of 10 for scalability. We have one instance per data center that supports everything that we need, and we haven't had to scale past that.

It's been several years since we've looked at other products. We used VMware SRM in the past, but Zerto is way faster. Zerto is easier to use than other solutions we've tried. 

Zerto is easy to set up. Once you've deployed the appliance and connected it to a  vCenter, your VMs are protected pretty quickly.

Zerto costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we haven't needed to use it in a real DR situation, so it's hard to quantify an ROI. However, based on what we know from testing, it will be a huge benefit in the worst-case scenario. 

Zerto's pricing is pretty competitive. They recently went through a licensing change where you have to buy an enterprise license as an organization. We weren't happy with that just because it forced us to pay for extra features we don't use. We would prefer if we could still have that standard license.

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.

We use Zerto to back up our VMs to our disaster recovery site.

Zerto is essential for protecting critical workloads. We don't protect all of our VMs, but some need to be recovered in a timely manner. The recovery time is almost immediate.

The fast recovery speed is Zerto's most valuable feature. It gives us peace of mind to know that the VMs are replicated and are there if we ever have a disaster. We recently upgraded our license to include the cloud because we are considering migrating from our hosted data center to cloud-based DR. Zerto's near-synchronous replication has been excellent. We haven't had any issues during our testing. It has worked flawlessly, and we're very pleased.

It would be difficult to do, but I would love it if Zerto handled some of the scripting and things necessary to do a recovery. For example, it would be helpful if the solution could update the DNS to point to a new location. It would be nice to automate some of those tasks that you have to do to recover a VM and they were kinda out-of-the-box point-and-click things rather than things that required you to write a script.

We have used Zerto for five years.

We haven't had any issues with scalability, but we haven't done a lot of scaling. We initially purchased a number of licenses, and we've kinda stayed about that number for the whole time. We're currently protecting 175 VMs, which is a small fraction of our total environment.

I rate Zerto customer service eight out of 10. It's been good. I haven't had to open any tickets with support, but we worked with our sales engineer to configure things, and it went well.

Positive

We've used backup providers before to do replication, but we've never had a solution that offered immediate recovery. We evaluated VMware SRM and some other backup providers, but none were quite on Zerto's level. The recovery speed doesn't compare to Zerto. Zerto is easy to use aside from the scripting aspect of things, but the other solutions aren't aren't any better in that regard. 

The setup is straightforward. We deploy an appliance, and it's up very quickly. The initial installation is done in a day, but it takes time to configure things exactly the way you want them, get the VMs protected, write scripts, etc. 

It's hard to quantify the return, but we can do what we set out to. We're able to recover critical services in a DR site. We haven't had to use it, but we know it's there, and we've done testing that shows it works. Hopefully, we don't have to use it, but it's a good insurance policy. 

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.

We utilized Zerto to facilitate the migration of servers within a data center from one location to another and employed it for disaster recovery purposes.

Zerto is user-friendly. The feedback I received from my team during the migration was that it was effortless to use. I wasn't directly involved in the implementation, but I participated in the decision-making process for purchasing and analyzing Zerto. However, the feedback I received from our team indicated that it was quite straightforward to use.

The benefit to our company was the ease of moving our servers using Zerto, which saved us a lot of time. I would like to emphasize that during the data center migration, it saved us a significant amount of time. Additionally, during the disaster recovery tests, when we actually used it, it worked exceptionally well. Zerto provides us with peace of mind. In the event of an incident, the ability to recover our data effectively also grants us peace of mind.

We utilized Zerto to transition from one cloud to another, ensuring that all of our operations and applications are now in the cloud. Having disaster recovery in the cloud is an important necessity for business continuity.

We use Zerto to help protect our virtual machines.

Zerto has helped reduce our disaster recovery testing.

With Zerto, we would not require additional staff or hire a third party to assist with disaster recovery.

Using Zerto for the migration was incredibly valuable, enabling us to save tremendous amounts of time. Thankfully, we have never had to utilize the disaster recovery feature. However, if the need arose, Zerto would be instrumental in preserving our business.

Not all of the knowledge required for implementing Zerto is available in their online documentation for non-partners.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

Scalability is really good. We deployed it fairly quickly across our environment.

The technical support is responsive and helpful.

Positive

The feedback I received from our team was that the majority of the deployment went smoothly, but there were some technical aspects that were not covered in the deployment documentation, which they had to figure out.

The deployment required two people at times, but the majority of it was completed by one person.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto has saved time during our data center migration, and we are utilizing it for our disaster recovery. However, we have not yet calculated the return on investment for it.

Zerto previously had a perplexing licensing structure, but they have since resolved it by implementing a unified license.

We evaluated Veeam Backup and Replication before choosing Zerto. Zerto offers live recording, allowing us to rewind to the exact moment when the incident occurred. At the time of our selection, Zerto was the only company with this capability.

I rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

For organizations planning to implement Zerto in-house, I recommend reviewing all the setup documentation beforehand.

We currently utilize Zerto as our disaster recovery solution. With Zerto, we replicate production virtual machines to our DR site. This approach enables us to recover and bring everything back online in a disaster swiftly. Our recovery point objective can be as low as five seconds, depending on the replication point.

Additionally, we employ Zerto for scaling purposes and for conducting upgrade testing. This entails spinning up VMs in an isolated environment, allowing us to perform various tests. For example, a few years ago, we tested the upgrade of our active directory domain controllers. By validating processes within this environment, we can ensure their smooth execution in production. These are the two primary use cases for Zerto in our organization.

Zerto is very user-friendly. We can select the VMs by installing a small agent specifically designed for the host. This agent identifies all the VMs. Zerto integrates smoothly with VMware, which is our primary core platform. I believe it also functions well with other hypervisors, although I am only familiar with VMware. Therefore, the integration with vSphere simplifies the process of creating groups, runbooks, and other components necessary for building our disaster recovery environment.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication performs admirably. Many times when I check, we are only about five seconds behind in terms of production time. Of course, this does depend on network performance. There have been instances where the delay exceeded five seconds due to network blips or other issues. However, for the most part, we consistently remain within a five-second range of our production environment.

As a manufacturer, a significant portion of our operations relies on timely execution in order to ensure efficient production and timely delivery of our products. We closely coordinate with external partners and customers to minimize downtime and maintain a seamless real-time production process, which is crucial for us.

The ability to conduct faster disaster recovery testing and the potential for quicker recovery in the event of a disaster have been greatly improved. Before using Zerto, our approach involved log shipping and manual recovery, which meant that the best we could do was recover the previous backup from the previous night, assuming the backup was successful. This process would take hours or even days. However, with Zerto's automation, we can now recover within seconds—five, ten, or twenty seconds from the point of the outage. We can bring systems back online automatically and at a significantly faster pace than our previous manual approach allowed.

Zerto has significantly improved our recovery time objectives compared to what they used to be. Previously, we would have to restore from backups from the previous night and manually configure systems. Therefore, the recovery time objective has likely decreased from days to approximately an hour, or perhaps even less. It's challenging to determine the precise timeframe in a real disaster scenario since we conduct disaster recovery testing. However, it is undoubtedly much better than it was before, although pinpointing the exact time of an actual disaster is somewhat different.

Zerto has helped us reduce our organization's disaster recovery testing from several days of preparation to just a single day.

Zerto is easy to configure and manage. The ability to quickly bring up VMs within a test environment allows us to test our disaster recovery functions and ensures that they would function just as well in an actual disaster scenario. This enables us to swiftly recover in the event of a disaster.

Zerto could be easier to configure when we need to perform data testing and establish network connectivity outside of the isolated environment. We encounter situations where there is a desire to test a printer during disaster recovery testing. However, due to the presence of an isolated environment, doing so can result in complex configurations. 

Zerto needs to improve its support for VMware Lifecycle Manager. This creates a problem with VMware's ability to automate the complete VMware stack upgrade.

I have been using Zerto for ten years.

Zerto is highly stable. It is rare to encounter any issues with it. Typically, any problems that arise are due to changes made on our end that may have inadvertently affected it. However, Zerto remains an exceptionally stable product.

To the best of my knowledge, Zerto can scale to the extent that we require. I am not aware of any limitations, as we have not encountered any thus far.

The technical support is generally very prompt in responding, and highly knowledgeable, and they will continue working with us until the problem is resolved.

Positive

We previously used Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and completely replaced it with Zerto.

Zerto is much easier to use compared to RecoverPoint. Previously, with RecoverPoint, we could only program-specific logs, and the VMs we wanted to replicate had to remain on those logs. If we moved the data off those logs, replication would be lost. However, Zerto keeps track of the VM regardless of its location, making it superior to RecoverPoint in terms of configuration and management.

Zerto is a more cost-effective product than Dell RecoverPoint.

The initial setup is straightforward. We need a virtual machine, install it, push it through, and configure it to communicate with the host for deployment. I mean, it's a very straightforward process. Two people were involved in the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The human resources necessary to perform a disaster recovery test are undoubtedly available. It is more economical than RecoverPoint. Now, it has been many years, and I am uncertain about the cost disparity. However, on the whole, there is a decrease in various aspects regarding the product's cost and the number of work hours needed for disaster recovery testing which is a clear return on investment.

The pricing is straightforward. We are on an enterprise licensing model, and it is based on a per-VM basis. We have the option to purchase them in blocks. This approach is quite cost-effective as we do not replicate our development and testing environments. We only replicate the production environment. Therefore, we are not paying for the entire setup, but only for what we are actually replicating.

I rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

Currently, we have a separate product that we use for backup, which has immutability features. However, we do not currently employ Zerto for immutability purposes.

We have considered using the cloud for disaster recovery, but currently, we maintain the same hardware at both locations. However, since we conduct all of our firmware testing and upgrades on our disaster recovery site first, we have decided to keep our own disaster recovery site instead of attempting to do it in the cloud.

We could easily transfer data to the disaster recovery system. One of Zerto's functions is to replicate data from virtual machines or migrate entire virtual machines, although we haven't utilized it for that purpose.

The only maintenance required is typically software updates. Whenever a new version is released, we must go through the process of upgrading Zerto. Other than that, unless there are any issues, it generally operates smoothly.

We just need to ensure that we know the number of virtual machines we would be replicating so that we can obtain the correct licensing. Otherwise, we will have to backtrack. If we underestimate, we will need to provide additional licensing. It is important to determine this information upfront, as well as the bandwidth between our site and the replication location, as it also affects our recovery objectives.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery purposes. We do not use Zerto for backups, only for the redundancy of the data center.

Zerto uses a rapid user interface that is user-friendly. Zerto's Near Synchronous Replication is helpful for our 12,000 servers.

Zerto runs behind the firewall to help block unknown threats and attacks. 

The solution has improved our RTO and we rarely experience any issues during failovers. We use Zerto on-premises and Azure for the cloud. We have a very good RTO whenever we have a failover from Zerto to the cloud.

Zerto reduced our downtime by approximately 15 percent by increasing our recovery speed. Zerto also helped our organization's disaster recovery testing by reducing the time it takes to bring up virtual machines on the DR side to 15 minutes.

Because Zerto's GUI is user-friendly, it is easy to execute a failover, so we require 1/3 of the employees to perform the task during recovery situations.

Our RTO is quick, and we can recover five to ten terabytes of data within minutes of a failover.

Zerto's effect on our RPO can be improved. When we have a VPG, we typically have multiple VMs and more than ten terabytes of data. This can cause long failover times due to data limitations, and sometimes the VPG can become full.

The technical support response time could also be improved. We often have to follow up multiple times to get a response, and when we do get a response, it is not always from the correct person who can handle our case.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is scalable. We have around 3,000 people that use Zerto in our organization. Zerto is deployed in multiple environments and multiple databases in two countries.

The technical support's response time is slow.

Neutral

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto.

Zerto is more cost-effective than Azure.

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

We wanted a solution that would help us reduce our recovery time objective, and Zerto does just that.

We use VPGs to maintain data consistency in our environment. We do this by placing multiple servers in a single VPG, which belongs to the same application or database.

Zerto can recover data quickly when the data size is under ten terabytes. However, recovery can be slow for data sizes that exceed ten terabytes.

The distance of our data transfers will affect the RTO. Data transfers within one region will be quicker than those across multiple regions.

We also use Azure Cloud and are currently migrating Zerto to the cloud. Both use a GUI interface and both have good failover tests.

I recommend Zerto but it does have data limitations when using a single VPG.